I’ve spent the last couple of days reading everything I could find about Henri Termeer.
Whenever you need a little motivation in your arduous journey, please read the story of this man. It will do your heart good. It will help you understand why you chose this journey…
Henri was the CEO of Genzyme, a company committed to developing life-saving treatments for rare diseases.
When he joined as CEO, the company didn’t have a clear plan about what it wanted to do.
Every weekend on a Saturday, sometimes Sunday too, we would meet either in the combat zone on the 50th floor of 75 Newland Street in Boston or in a classroom at MIT and talk about what we could uniquely do…
We couldn’t do much with what we had back then but we could do a lot if we let our minds go wild…
We wanted to do important stuff, to make a big difference.
In tremendous amount of good fortune, we focused on Gaucher, a disease that causes fatty deposits to accumulate in certain bones and organs and affected young children.
What’s missing in these patients is an enzyme that normally breaks down lipids in the body.
We found that the enzyme was in high concentration in the placenta.
We had a small car which we would use to visit hospitals and collect placentas.
In the evening, I would go home and the sweet smell of placentas would still be in the car.
We would lift the heavy placentas and take them to our office on the 50th floor where we had two centrifuges.
We had to spin the placentas to get rid of the fluid as we needed only the dry placenta tissue.
When we did that, the whole building would vibrate and all 50 floors would stop working!
We first tested the enzyme on Brian, a four-year-old boy.
To watch a four-year-old child who is slowly degenerating before your very eyes is a terrible experience. When you see a boy like that, you want to help him.
Brian was given an infusion and the effect was immediately visible. After only three or four infusions, he felt a lot better. He was more active and felt healthy.
That was the moment that I remember the most in my life, the moment that motivated me the most in the 30 years I spent in Genzyme.
But then, ten years of ridiculous mountains passed…
Many people would say to me, are you kidding me? This can’t work.
The reason was that we needed 20,000 placentas, 20,000 kids to be born, to treat one patient for a year!
Well-known Harvard names said to me we couldn’t bet the company on one patient.
We ignored them.
It was actually three of us who really believed: one scientist, Brian’s mother, Robin, and myself.
Because I saw the kid, I saw the family, I saw the difference!
So, we went out to raise the money…
I personally travelled around the country to talk to nice-meaning people.
I brought Robin to talk in a room full of investors.
The people in that room got the message and started calling their colleagues all around the country.
In the end, we managed to sell an RnD limited partnership worth $10 billion in the next five days.
And this is how we managed to do a small trial on 12 people.
The FDA had 214 patients. I said to them, I can only do 12 because I don’t have enough placentas.
Our enzyme worked on all of them. It was a dramatic difference!
But then, we had to overcome the hurdle of the placentas.
We found a plant in France where they extracted plasma from placentas using winepresses.
I told them, I can’t build a plant, but I can give you the money to build one.
You need the fluid, I need the dry tissue.
They declared us crazy… but they agreed to partner with us.
It was a very emotional partnership…
In the end, we managed to treat about a thousand kids.
Visualise the logistics: we processed the enzyme from almost 33 per cent of all placentas from birth in the United States.
Million of placentas would find their way to this little town in France…
This is how we built our culture.
Our culture was: Yes, you can do this. And if no one can see it but you, you can still be right…” — Henri Termeer